


oh holy night

by smileymikey



Category: SKAM (Norway)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, M/M, Mental Health Issues, POV Outsider, Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-27
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:21:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27748171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smileymikey/pseuds/smileymikey
Summary: Terje strokes her sweaty hair away from her brow. “What are you thinking for a name?”Marianne has a lot of favourite Bible verses, verses that bring her peace and settle her heart whenever she is anxious, but she does not think it is a coincidence God chose to give her a child on this day at this time. This baby is a gift from Him: she wishes to honour that and bring her son all the love he can get.“Isak,” she breathes softly, and in her arms, her baby blinks open his foggy eyes and looks at her for the first time. “His name is Isak.”or, a mother's perspective on her child.
Relationships: Even Bech Næsheim/Isak Valtersen, Isak Valtersen & Marianne Valtersen
Comments: 8
Kudos: 79





	oh holy night

**Author's Note:**

> will i ever stop writing these introspective skam fics? no  
> tune in next time for the piece from the pov of the booby science teacher

It is a long labour. Her legs are numb and she does not think she can move: her mouth tastes like blood and tap water, thick with drainage residue. Terje holds her hand for the full nineteen hours she spends in bed.

But it is all worth it when, at twenty-one past nine in the evening, Marianne holds her baby in her arms for the first time.

He is slick and red and screaming, his mouth taking up most of his face, with murky eyes screwed shut and fine hair on his head streaked with blood. He is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen.

Terje strokes her sweaty hair away from her brow. “What are you thinking for a name?”

Marianne has a lot of favourite Bible verses, verses that bring her peace and settle her heart whenever she is anxious, but she does not think it is a coincidence God chose to give her a child on this day at this time. This baby is a gift from Him: she wishes to honour that and bring her son all the love he can get.

“Isak,” she breathes softly, and in her arms, her baby blinks open his foggy eyes and looks at her for the first time. “His name is Isak.”

*

Isak takes after her as he grows up.

He has her blond hair and her eyes: Terje’s mouth, though, the dip in his lip Marianne used to fit her finger into when they were dating. She does it to Isak until he gets old enough to be embarrassed by it, which is eleven. Sooner than she had hoped. He grows so fast.

She and Terje have another child a few years after Isak, Lea, who is born on the winter solstice in the middle of a snowstorm, and Marianne clutches her to her chest in the hospital and thanks God that He has given her two beautiful children. Lea grows up to look like Terje in every way Isak looks like Marianne, like they have just had copies of each other. When she and Terje first stated dating, they would always talk about what it would be like to have children that looked like one another running around the house.

“I’d want them to have your spirit,” Terje would say. “You have such fighting spirit, Marianne.”

But now that they have them, he doesn’t bring it up.

Marianne tries to, once, in the kitchen, when Isak and Lea are watching television in the other room. “How nice,” she says, “that they look so much like us.”

Terje glances at her. “What do you mean?”

“It’s like what we wanted. God answered our prayers.”

“Your prayers,” he says. Not kindly.

“Didn’t you pray for them?” Doesn’t he still? She prays over them every night. It is her last thought before she falls asleep: _God, keep them safe_.

“Not everyone believes in your ideas, Marianne.”

He is getting like this more and more: not listening, distant. She feels like there is a glass pane between them. Some days it is so clear it is as though she can reach through it and touch, but on others it is murky and translucent, so all she can see is a backlit silhouette. She has believed in God since the two of them met, and he has never called it an “idea” before.

It is just a bad day, she tells herself, as she watches him exit the kitchen. She will talk to him tomorrow, and it will just be like the old times.

*

The month after the sixteenth summer solstice since Isak was born, Marianne wakes up and the bed is empty.

Not just the bed: the wardrobe, too. The pillow case next to hers has been stripped. She hesitantly swings her legs over the side of the bed, sees that one of the suitcases they used to use whenever they would scrounge up enough money to visit her family in Sweden are gone too.

She puts her feet on the ground to stand up, and suddenly the ground is hot coal. She opens her mouth but she cannot move, she is paralysed, and when she looks down she sees that there are flames licking at her feet and her skin is melting. She is in so much pain. Her hands come up to her own shoulders, frantically pulling at her skin. Is she in Hell? Has she died in her sleep? She needs it _come off_. She is burning from the inside out. She can hear the screaming of the damned souls.

Then, from in front of her, the door swings open, and Isak, her beautiful Isak, is stood on the landing. Don’t come in, she wants to shout, you will burn too! but when she tries to move her mouth she finds it is already open, that her throat is scraped raw, her hands like claws curled into her hair.

It is not the damned souls that are screaming. It is her.

“Mamma?” Isak says. “What’s going on?”

“Your father is gone.”

His face is white and small. Marianne thinks of the baby in her arms all those years ago. “Lea isn’t here,” he says.

He took Marianne’s daughter too. Her winter child.

“Don’t let him take you too,” she says. Her hands pull at her face, and they come away wet. “He can’t take you too. My baby.”

Isak is sixteen, and she is alone.

*

The next few days are a haze. She stays in bed. Her clocks are spying on her so Isak marks the time now, when he leaves and when he comes home. Sometimes she can hear voices: sometimes they are Isak’s. Sometimes they are the angels. There is another person in the house too, someone with a vouch like Isak’s, freshly broken. One day she hears it hushing reassurances on top of the sound of Isak crying.

She does not know what is real. She hopes that is not.

*

Then, all of a sudden, Isak stops coming and going. Marianne thinks it has just been a long day until she starts counting the seconds and reaches nineteen hours, the length of his labour, and he has not come home. She starts to shake.

At thirty-two hours, the door clicks open. It is a male voice: one she does not recognise. She thinks it is one of her angel voices, until she hears it opening cupboards, and the angels don’t open cupboards. “We should take your clothes,” it says. “Where are your underwear? Socks?”

Marianne does not have a lamp anymore because she knows the government plants cameras in them, so she has to fumble around for the door when she gets out of her bed. Her legs are shaky but she has learned to get used to the hot coals. The hallway feels old, and it is covered in broken glass. Distantly, she wonders where it came from.

She follows the voices to Isak’s room, pushes open the door. In it she sees Isak stood with a man several inches taller than him with close-cropped hair, fair like her and her boy. Nearly red, the colour of the devil, and all at once she is afraid.

“Isak?” she says, and Isak turns around like a whip. “What are you doing?”

She does not like the look on Isak’s face: guilty and scared and worried. She doesn’t like to see her boy upset. She moves close to him to touch his face and then the man with him steps forward, half a foot in front of him: like he is shielding him. From her?

“You must be Marianne,” he says. “My name is Eskild. Nice to meet you.”

He holds out his hand. Marianne stares at it until he coughs and drops it.

“Isak is going to stay with me for a bit,” he says. “Just while things get... sorted out.”

Her gaze moves to Isak. “You’re leaving me?”

But he is looking down at her feet. “Mamma, you’re bleeding.”

She looks down too, and does not see what he is seeing. She is not seeing the bleeding, but she can see the coal – can he as well? Maybe this Eskild is the devil with his near-red hair and she is in Hell. But her baby would never be in Hell with her, he is too good for that.

Then she hears the crunch of glass and realises that she must have got it trapped underfoot.

They do not hurt but Isak puts his arm around her and helps her back to bed. He is taller than she remembers, but she remembers him as ten, right before he got too cool for her to touch his mouth like she used to do to his father, when his curls were still long and framed his blue eyes like an angel. They are cut shorter now, his eyes drawn, face pale. Purple stains his under-eyes like a bruise.

He pulls the glass from out her feet, and Eskild helps him. Eskild is gentle with her: she does not think he is the devil any longer.

“I’m sorry,” Isak whispers, voice thick. “I’m sorry, Mamma.”

“Why are you sorry?” She looks up at his beautiful face in the dark. “You have nothing to be sorry about.”

He smiles, thinly, takes her hand and squeezes it. “You’re going to go somewhere that will look after you,” he says. “They’ll treat you well there. Better than I can.”

“Will I see you?”

He bites his lip. “I’ll try.”

She is satisfied with this. She turns to Eskild, who is watching them with a sad expression. “Take care of him,” she says.

Eskild nods. “I will.”

“You should throw away your watch. It is listening to you, you know. Feeding lies to the government.” It is why she smashed the alarm clock. She wonders how many of the bloodied glass shards in her feet belong to it. Eskild nods at this too, sagely.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he says. To Isak, “Come on, baby Jesus.”

Isak doesn’t look back as he leaves.

 _Baby Jesus_ , she thinks. It is fitting.

*

Marianne likes life at the New Hope facility. The nurses are kind to her, if a little stupid: they all wear watches and keep televisions around the building, despite how many times she has told them that they emit radiation that will kill them all in ten years. She had the television removed from her room, but this was not extended around the rest of the hospital. Ignorant, she thinks, so she does not leave the room much.

Still, it is a nice place. She is fed and looked after, and she’s allowed her Bible. She takes medication that means she doesn’t hear the angels’ voices as much anymore, and the coal on the floor is beginning to hurt less and less, until there are some days where the floor is just floor.

Also, they let her have her phone. She knows what the new phones are like, with the glowing touch-activated screens, so she gets a small one with buttons, the kind she used to call Terje with in college.

In it are programmed three numbers: the hospital. Terje. And Isak.

Terje does not visit: instead sends his love in the form of her hospital bills. It is nice of him, though sometimes she misses Lea like a hole in her chest. Marianne wonders how her winter child is doing, whether she celebrates the shortest day of the year with the honour that Marianne always did.

Marianne does not miss Terje.

But Isak. Isak does not visit, either: and this, she misses.

She texts him a lot: verses she read in the morning that spoke to her. Things she is praying for. What God tells her when she is quiet on the bed. She wants him to know what is going on in her life; she wants him to know that she is thinking of him. Nothing is more special to her than her faith, so she hopes that he realises by her sharing it she is telling him how much he means to her, that she wants to extend this part of her life to him.

He never responds.

*

Then, one day, one of Marianne’s nurses, the pretty one, who doesn’t wear her watch around her, tells her that she has a new message.

“Is it from Isak?” Marianne says. Maybe the reason Isak does not respond to her texts is because he is leaving messages at the front desk that are getting lost in the computer. She does not trust that thing either.

The nurse shakes her head. “Your husband.”

It is odd hearing Terje being referred to as your husband. Marianne supposes they never divorced. “What did he say?”

The nurse regales the message: that he thought it would be nice to go to the annual Christmas service together at Sagene Church, Marianne, him and Isak. He says that he has messaged Isak about it and he has yet to respond but that it would be nice to see her again.

The Christmas service at Sagene Church is something they attended every year when they were all still together. Marianne does not know what to think: recognises the olive branch for what it is, which is peace, but she is torn, because the last he spoke of her faith it was all nonsense to him.

“Marianne?” the nurse prompts gently. “What would you like me to respond with?”

Still: Christmas is Christmas. And it will be a reason to see Isak again, her summer boy, who she has not seen in months.

“Tell him I will go,” she says.

*

The week before the service is a bad one.

The doctors changed her medication because the first one started giving her migraines, but now the coals are back, and the angels, only this time their voices are less reassuring. She lies in bed in Hell for hours, sweating it out, feeling like she is melting through the mattress and into the floor, rotting for all eternity. She is moved from her room to a special one on the floor below, away from the other residents: later, she realises it is because she won’t stop screaming.

This room has a television in it, too. She cannot move.

By the Sunday she is well enough to back to her room, back to her Bible and mobile phone. The pretty nurse is there with water and soft pretzels.

“Glad to see you’re back, Marianne,” she says. She gives Marianne her phone. “Isak texted while you were out.”

It is the first time Isak has reached out since he left. Marianne takes the phone.

*

_Hi Mum. I’m together with a guy. I know you believe in God and that it says in the Bible that it is a sin, but you don’t need to be afraid because it also says that God created everyone in his image and everyone is equal. Sorry if it made you sad. Hugs from Isak._

*

Her beautiful, beautiful boy.

She doesn’t think she has ever loved someone as she loves him: and she knows that God loves him too. That no matter what he does, where he goes, no matter what, he is her son, and he is the most important thing in her life.

She is heartbroken that her faith has made him afraid. All she wished to do was show that she cared, but she drove him away instead.

She vows to be a better mother; to never let him doubt her love for him ever again.

_From the first second I saw you on 21 st June 1999 at 21:21 I have loved you and I always will, for eternity._

*

Isak has grown up so much since Marianne last saw him.

In the red and gold of the church, he has never been more handsome. She sees him come down the aisle with his hands in his pockets, his Terje mouth pursed and his Marianne hair glinting like spun gold. He looks like the angels she no longer hears from.

“Isak,” Terje says. This is the first time he has seen him in a long time, too. They are a triangulation of tangled crossroads. “How are you?”

“I’m okay,” Isak says. His voice is deeper. He looks tired. Marianne wants to put her arms around him and then realises that he may not let her.

She wants to say more but then the organ starts and they all shuffle along and sit in a pew. Isak ends up between the two of them. He looks so much like the boy at ten that it makes her ache. She remembers his pale, frightened face in his bedroom that day with Eskild, when he pulled glass out of her feet and squeezed her hand. If she had known it was goodbye she would have held on a little longer.

But he is here now. She has him at least for this.

Then, halfway through the service, in the middle of her favourite Christmas carol, she sees him pull a phone out of his pocket, and his face flattens in the way it did when she caught him in his bedroom. She is not expecting it when he stands, suddenly: but she is not surprised, either.

“Where are you going?” Terje says.

“I need to do something,” Isak says. “Sorry.”

And then he’s gone.

Terje looks at her helplessly, but all at once she is at peace. This is her boy, who is not really a boy anymore: she doesn’t think he’s been one since he left the house. She loves him dearly, and she knows that God does, too.

Not for the first time, she goes back to the prayer she used to whisper over his cot at night.

_God, keep him safe._

*

That night, when Marianne has returned to the facility, she gets a text.

_Hei Mamma. It was nice seeing you again. Sorry I ran out during the service._

_I was seeing about a boy. His name is Even, and he is very special to me. Maybe one day you can meet him._

_I love you._

_Isak. x_

She smiles.

_I would like that Isak. I love you too._

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](https://smileymikey.tumblr.com/)


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